Aquinas, Morality, and Modernity: The Promise of the Natural Moral Law. 2013 175,878 words
Aquinas, Morality, and Modernity traces the collapse in the idea of an overarching and authoritative moral framework in a line of development that proceeds from the Protestant Reformation to modern liberalism, secularism, relativism and atheism. In particular, the analysis charts the dissipation of objective morality from the intersubjectivism and universalism of Immanuel Kant to the nihilism of Nietzsche. The book identifies Max Weber as a key figure in giving sociological expression to the moral impasse which characterises the modern world.
The book thus offers a detailed presentation of St. Thomas Aquinas' philosophical-theological synthesis has providing the only secure basis for the objective and universal foundations of the moral law and the common good. The argument is that the normative and emancipatory claims of the universal claims of the greatest of the modern moral and political philosophers – Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx - can only be realised by being grounded in St Thomas Aquinas’ natural moral law, rationalist metaphysics of being and realist epistemology.
Morality, Sociality, and Modernity: The Quest for Meaning and Belonging. 2018. 191,596 words
The book identifies modern crises in identity and certainty as a search for a lost meaning and belonging and, more than nostalgic recovery, as a quest for substantive morality and community. The book is a thoroughgoing exploration of the linked antitheses of community-society, authority-power, status-class, sacred-secular, alienation-progress through the work of Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Simmel, Tonnies, Heidegger, and others. The book offers a closely reasoned analysis of the critical issues in social theory: morality, religion, rationalization, postmodernity, individualism and collectivism, and the unravelling of our inherited ecosystems. The book shows how deep the problems of the modern age, and what is required to recover meaning, personality, and community within internally ordered, self-governing communities. Rehabilitating the ethical life within virtuous communities of practice is show to be key to reinhabiting place.
The Ecology of Good. 2020 168,220 words
The Ecology of Good is a book about ‘good,’ written at a time when the dominant minds think that standards of good and evil no longer exist, or do so only by being contextualised or relativized away, reduced to and sunk in the swamp of power and identity. In this book, philosopher Peter Critchley turns the fashionable nonsense of the age on its head to reveal good and evil to be real, objective, and universal. He also shows why these moral standards need to be rediscovered in our age, and, being both transcendent and immanent, how.
At a time when standards of good and evil have disappeared from our language, culture, and practical lives, and the moral and intellectual virtues with them, Critchley establishes the foundations of virtue and vice in the contemporary world. In the process, he underlines the timeliness and enduring significance of these seemingly archaic notions to our practical lives with respect to family, community, polity, and civilisation.
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